True. But it would be interesting to see a more "open" East Slavic state where Ukrainians, Belarusians, as well as regional identities in Russia get more representation.
Possibly with a capital in Kiev, the oldest East Slavic capital after Novgorod.
Well, for the Russian Empire in its later stages, it was the official view that "White Russians" and "Little Russians" were, quite simply, Russians--with some distinctive linguistic and other features, to be sure, due to their having been torn away from the "Great Russians" by the Mongol invasion and living for centuries under Lithuanian and Polish rule--but still Russians. (Incidentally, the Russian Imperial government actually encouraged the Ukrainian cultural revival in the 1830's. Interest in "Little Russian" culture was encouraged in order to de-Polonize right-bank Ukrainians who had lived so long under Polish rule. The point in teaching them that they were "Little Russians" was not to emphasize their differences from the "Great Russians" but their differences from the Poles.)
As for the USSR, of its four original founding members, three were East Slavic (RSFSR, Ukraine, Belarus)--the Transcaucasian Federation being the fourth. But having the capital in Kiev would be out of the question--too close to the Polish border, too exposed in case of war (after all, that was why they moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in the first place). Anyway, it was really only in the 1930's that Stalinist historians emphasized the idea of Kievan Rus' as the common ancestor of all East Slavs.